Status of GPA and GPGME

[David Shaw]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 02:11:35AM +0200, Miguel Coca wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 17:55:15 -0400, David Shaw wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 12:59:16AM +0200, Miguel Coca wrote:
> > > If I understood you, once we support one of the helpers, we support all of
> > > them, right? So, there should be no problem if we released a GPA without
> > > HKP support. Then, as soon as HKP was taken out of gpg, it would be
> > > added to the list of supported protocols without much effort.
> > 
> > Correct.  You can actually support it now (I committed the missing
> > code today), but it should still be considered unstable.
> 
> Hmmm, I haven't taken a serious look at it. I'll probably do after I get key
> backups working. But, is there a way to find out which helpers gpg knows
> about and/or their location? I gather that is a compile time option, so gpg
> is the only one that knows.

It's a combination of compile time and runtime.  Basically, gpg sets
$PATH to /usr/[local/]libexec/gnupg and then tries to execlp
gpgkeys_xxxx where xxxx is the scheme (hkp, ldap, dns, mailto, etc.)
If the exec succeeds, then great.  If it returns ENOENT, then there is
no handler for that keyserver type.  See the code in g10/keyserver.c
(keyserver_spawn) and especially g10/exec.c for the details.

The /usr/local/libexec/gnupg path can be overridden at compile time
via the configure option --libexecdir, but the user can also override
that via a runtime config file option "exec-path" if they want their
own directories searched for keyserver plugins.  This allows users to
create their own plugins or override the existing plugins.

David

-- 
   David Shaw  |  dshaw@jabberwocky.com  |  WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/
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